Saying I've just returned from a country in which I witnessed huge protests calling for economic justice doesn't tell you much about where I was -- it only narrows it to about 15 or 20 countries. In fact, I was in Spain during the loosely coordinated worldwide demonstration that took place on October 15th. The date was chosen because it was the five-month anniversary of the Spanish protests, which began in the middle of May. Many of the Occupy Wall Street protesters have said that the Spanish protests served as one of their inspirations, and many of the Spanish protesters I spoke to said they had been re-energized by OWS. (What's the Spanish word for "synergy?")
There were protests in over 80 countries on the 15th, with half a million taking to the streets in Madrid to voice their frustration with a political system that has failed the people of Spain -- in the same way our own "Los Indignados" (Spanish for "The Outraged") are voicing their anger and frustration at a system that has failed the "99 percent" here in America.
The Spanish protests have become the granddaddy of the protest movements sweeping most Western democracies, and might just offer a look at the future of what's to come on this side of the Atlantic. There are three things in particular that strike me as I look back on my week in Spain and try to apply it to the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon unfolding here.
The first is the political paradox inherent in the European protests. In Spain, the dissatisfaction is widely expected to lead to an overwhelming victory for the conservative candidate for prime minister, Mariano Rajoy of the Popular Party, over Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba of the Socialist Party, in elections to be held on November 20th. (The current prime minister, Socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, announced in April that he wouldn't be running for a third term.) By some estimates, the Popular Party may win over 190 of the 350 seats in the Spanish Parliament, while the Socialists might drop below 120.
Meanwhile in France, in elections to be held in April, it is widely expected that President Nicolas Sarkozy of the conservative Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) will lose to the Socialist Party candidate, François Hollande. This shows that the outpouring of anger isn't directed against any one particular party or political philosophy, but against the status quo. It doesn't matter what party you represent; if you're in power, you're part of the broken political system and the people of Spain, of France, and, quite possibly of the United States, want you out.
In Spain, the evidence of the failure of the status quo is particularly stark, with an unemployment rate of nearly 21 percent (over twice what it is here). Among young people, the number has soared to 45 percent, the highest in Europe.
While I was in Spain, I spent an hour with each of the two leading candidates for prime minister. There were, of course, many differences in their positions, but they were both hearing the Indignados loud and clear.
"Three years into the recession," Rubalcaba told me, "the Spanish only have one word on their minds: 'change.'" He spoke especially about the plight of the young, the so-called "Lost Generation" of those who have recently graduated from college and have little chance of finding work any time soon. "They did everything they needed to do to have a future, and now they can't find a job," he said.
Even though they're more than likely to vote his party out of power, Rubalcaba is not, as many of his American counterparts are, willfully blind to what's fueling the protesters. "The people out there demonstrating aren't anti-system," he said. "They expect solutions from politics, from the system, and they haven't gotten them."
For his part, Mariano Rajoy has eagerly presented himself as the conduit for the widespread desire for change. Like his opponent, he too stressed that his "basic priority" is employment and jobs. "Many young people don't see a future," he told me, noting that in Spain, as in the U.S., for the first time the younger generation doesn't expect to do as well as their parents.
The second thing that struck me was how family-oriented the protests were. However they started, they are now truly a middle-class movement. But when I looked at how the media covered the October 15th protests, instead of the thousands of families and children and retirees who marched in the streets, what dominated the airwaves were burning cars from the protest in Rome -- which was hijacked by a coterie of masked anarchists.
Just as solutions to the problems facing Europe and America are not going to be found in traditional political ways, the truth of what's happening is not going to be found in traditional media coverage either. The conventional wisdom of the establishment media has been constantly upended -- not just about the economic crisis and how it unfolded, but about the reaction to it, as well.
Greg Sargent, for example, convincingly challenged the conventional wisdom that there is some unbridgeable "cultural fault line" between blue-collar white Americans and the people who take to the streets to protest for economic justice. He pointed to a recent National Journal poll in which the percentage of non-college-educated whites who agree with the Occupy Wall Street protesters was 56. Just over 30 percent disagreed. Sargent also cited a Time poll in which the percentage of those in agreement with OWS was over 50 percent.
So the real message of the protesters is getting out, even if many in the media want to portray it as a hippie-dippy relic of the 1960s. In a piece for HuffPost, CNBC contributor and former White House aide Keith Boykin concludes that, after visiting Zuccotti Park, "almost everything the media told me about the protest is wrong."
Boykin takes apart myths like "The Movement Is Violent," "It's Just A Bunch Of Pampered Kids," and "There Are No Black People Involved." Boykin says he was "taken aback by how many black and Latino participants" he saw. "I hadn't seen them on the television coverage," he writes. He also counters the idea that it's just a bunch of hippies. "To watch some of the media coverage of the movement, you would think the protest was filled with long-haired hippies left over from the 1960s," he writes, noting he saw "high school-aged kids with their parents, college students in their school sweatshirts, men in business suits, mothers with baby carriages, people with jobs, people who were unemployed," and "white-haired retirees."
The third thing that struck me about the protests -- both in Spain and here -- is that they are about more than political and economic goals. They are bigger than that. They are about changing civil society -- about creating a new relationship not just between the people and their government, but among the people themselves. There's the growing sense that the problems we're facing can't be solved just by fixing our political institutions. We need to transform our relationships to our communities.
There is, of course, a rich tradition for strengthening civil society here in America -- but not so in Spain. As Rubalcaba told me, an activist civil society isn't something that's been historically nurtured. "Spanish civil society is passive," he said.
Working hard to help Spain develop its civil society muscle is U.S. Ambassador Alan Solomont, the former chairman of the board for the Corporation for National and Community Service, the federal agency responsible for Senior Corps, AmeriCorps, and Learn and Serve America. A one-time community organizer, Solomont has spent his life championing the need to develop a culture of citizenship, service, and social responsibility in America -- and is trying to assist Spain in doing the same. As he told me: "Civic participation is not a luxury but a necessity for a healthy democracy."
The need to nurture civil society was acknowledged by both candidates. And so was the need for entrepreneurship and innovation. Indeed, it was Rubalcaba, the Socialist candidate, who lamented the fact that "the coming century should be our century -- Spain has a lot of creativity, innovation and intelligence, but risk is not part of our DNA." He sees nurturing an entrepreneurial spirit -- especially among the young -- as key to Spain's turnaround: "It's about enabling people to have a chance to get as far as they can."
If we're going get out of this mess -- the U.S., Spain, Greece and all the rest -- there are two essential ingredients we'll need: empathy nurtured by a strong civil society, and innovation nurtured by an entrepreneurial spirit. Producing a political system that rewards these essential traits, instead of being at the mercy of lobbyists and big money donors, may require a movement of citizens taking to the streets.
As George Bernard Shaw put it: "All progress depends on the unreasonable man."
Follow Arianna Huffington on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ariannahuff
Can we apply that to the OWS - the more the evil empire cracks down on the protestors, the more people fall from their grasp, the more the movement will grow.
The EU and US financial crisis have commonality and can be summarized in this general way. EU and US banks made investments that soured. To prevent a panic, and the collapse of each banking system, the EU and US governments used their "central bank" to buy the soured paper from the PRIVATE banks, at a discount. The EU's ECB was not capable of doing it alone. They created an ECB fund (ESFS) to raise money and asked the IMF (and other governments) to help. The bottom line is this. The population of Europe and the US, through each of their government's central bank, are left holding tons of the bad investments of the PRIVATE banking system.
This afternoon I visited my city's occupy and talked with several people who are serving there. None of those people are greedy (unless its greedy for peace and justice) but many of them are impoverished by the rapacious corporations who act as the masters for many of our politicians.
by the way, banana, which occupy have you visited lately to inform your perspective?
In the early '80s, Michigan's jobs were shipped south to right to work states and the Maquiladoras on the border. Ultimately, the rust belt was left hanging with the only option recognized by decision makers was turning those states into "service states" instead of producing states. It didn't pan out of course and the strategy only produced a third world economy. Service sector jobs, of course, required only minimum wage workers. The educated and trained workers of these locales had to move to find any employment while those left behind had to work 3 "service" jobs to eat and pay for housing. Forget about healthcare and education for the children.
The OWS movement came about by people close to the underpinning of society seeing the hopelessness in their futures. A byproduct of the "class warfare" is the lack of justice practiced regarding the perpetrators of this giant theft of a way of life.
It seems to me that the New Media, of which Huffington Post is at the vanguard, are helping to play an essential role in getting this message of global economic equality in front of people.
I'm wondering if you've considered dedicating a page to the Occupy Movement (in much the same vein as there is one for Arab Spring, for instance). Doing so might help present a coherent forum for concerned voices, as well as establish a place to discuss matters such as positive civil disobedience and constructive visions of where this kind of social change might lead us.
Personally, I would see such an effort as a further extension of the "passionate reason" HuffPost strives to embody.
All The Best,
Wm
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No wonder we are getting no where with Obama. Appearing reasonable or "the Adult in the room" is his political brand and he wears if proudly.
Good luck getting change from this guy.
and he did remove OBL, among others
and he is extricating us from Iraq, albeit in a flawed manner
and he is now pushing for jobs and student loan reform, which you know McCain (gasp, could he have been elected?) would never even concieve let alone push
so, maybe we do have some things different today
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-ferguson/the-financial-crisis-and-_1_b_782927.html
Charles Ferguson: The Financial Crisis and America's Political Duopoly
"...My answer is this: far from being in an era of brutal partisan warfare, as conventional wisdom holds and as watching the nightly television news might suggest, the United States is now in the grip of a political duopoly in which both parties are thoroughly complicit. They play a game: they agree to fight viciously over certain things to retain the allegiance of their respective bases, while agreeing not to fight about anything that seriously endangers the privileges of America's new financial elites. Whether this duopoly will endure, and what to do about it, are perhaps the most important questions facing Americans. The current arrangement all but guarantees the continuing decline of the United States as a nation, and of the welfare of the bottom 90% of its citizens.
[snip]
In my personal conversations, I sense an emerging consensus based on nothing more complicated than a sense of basic honesty, fairness, and common sense, qualities which the American people still have in abundance. Let us hope that this can be translated into some organized force that can put an end to the present political cartel. "
Occupy your brain people and it will be done with once and for all!
LOL - the politicians on one side of the aisle offer us an imaginary fight, the other side of the aisle offers us imaginary jobs. Maybe we should all pay our taxes with imaginary money in return for their imaginary representation.